Luke Maslen
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Aron,
[Aaron Pulicano] “are you saying you can in fact use a PCIe 4x USB 3.0 card with the Intensity Shuttle rather then having to build a new computer based on an Intel X58 motherboard?”
No. The Intel x58 chipset is essential because it fully supports the PCI Express 2.0 specification which in turn provides enough capacity to drive the full speed of USB 3.0. There are some cut down versions of the x58 chipset which are cheaper but they don’t provide reliable performance for things like uncompressed 10-bit playback. Currently we will exclusively recommend the x58 series motherboards but I’m sure this will change rapidly as motherboards seem to be updated every few months so we should see other options soon.
Could you please repost your question about 480p support next week? The relevant engineers are at NAB this week so I’m unsure if I can get an answer for you. But if you repost next week, we should be able to get an answer for you.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Jason,
[Jason Finnigan] “What advantage (besides saying your one of the few who have a usb 3.0 i/o device) would one of these give you … but it doesn’t have anything on a pcie card that I would think of except laptops, but I’ve never seen anyone ingest on a laptop.”
You’re quite right that a USB 3.0 i/o device will simply do the same things that a PCIe i/o card will do. However …
1. Obviously it’s much easier to install a USB device as you just plug in to an external port on the computer. With PCIe cards, you need to open the computer, unscrew things, plug in the card and try not to crack the motherboard as you press down on it (I’ve done that before!), close everything up and try not to cut your hand on any nasty sharp bits of metal inside.
2. USB 3.0 will soon make it possible to capture and playback uncompressed video with laptops which is obviously something that many people will want to do. The current generation of USB 3.0 chips used in laptops do not run USB 3.0 as fast as the USB 3.0 standard allows and are not quite adequate for uncompressed HD. However tower PCs with the x58 series chip do support the “super speed” of USB 3.0 and are fine for use with all our new USB 3.0 products. It won’t be long before laptops have faster USB 3.0 chips which are adequate for uncompressed HD video as computers are always becoming faster.
3. As USB 3.0 becomes increasingly common, PC manufacturers will likely make smaller, cheaper PC’s because they can now remove the PCI Express slots and simply include a few USB 3.0 slots. So we wanted to make devices which allow people to use low cost but powerful computers.
I don’t think PCI Express slots will disappear any time soon as there are various applications where cards might be more convenient, e.g. video streaming servers containing multiple cards is a much neater solution than a whole bunch of external USB devices connected to a server. Educational facilities would probably prefer PCI Express cards as they are less likely to walk out the door than a USB device. However I do expect a transition to computers with either no PCI Express slots or fewer slots as USB 3.0 takes hold.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Mayer,
[Mayer Chalom] “Can I use the blackmagic intensity pro to connect my vhs player and capture the video through final cut pro and choose any file format.”
Yes you can do that although we don’t test “all file formats” but provide easy setups in Final Cut Pro so you can choose one of the ones we’ve tested and know works well.
Depending on your vintage of VHS player, it might have a single composite video output (good quality), or it might offer S-Video output (better quality) or some current models even offer component analog video output (best quality). Follow the connection diagrams in the Intensity PDF manual to connect the best quality analog video that your VHS player provides. You will also want to connect the left and right audio connections.
Having done that, launch Final Cut Pro, go to the Final Cut Pro menu and choose Easy Setup. Select a Blackmagic NTSC or PAL easy setup to match the format of your video. You will find several Blackmagic NTSC easy setups and several Blackmagic PAL easy setups providing you with a selection of codecs.
If you have the storage space and speed, select a Blackmagic NTSC Uncompressed or Blackmagic PAL uncompressed easy setup. Uncompressed will retain the full quality of your video capture which is nice because encoding for DVD will cause one generation of lossy compression and it’s great to avoid multiple generations of lossy compression
If your disk storage doesn’t have the speed or capacity to handle the uncompressed codec, then choose from one of the compressed options such as ProRes, JPEG or DV50.
You can now capture your VHS tape in to Final Cut Pro. Given your friend doesn’t want any editing, you can then send the captured sequence to DVD Studio Pro via Compressor. You could use iDVD because it is much simpler than DVD Studio Pro but you will achieve a much higher quality DVD if you use DVD Studio Pro. Encoding to DVD always takes a while but it will be quicker if you captured with an uncompressed easy setup as no decoding will be necessary before re-encoding for DVD.
You should also be able to use Intensity Pro to capture from the RCA connections on your Canon Elura and the Canon XL1. The most you might need is an S-Video to 2 RCA adapter so you can capture with S-Video rather than composite.
Good luck!
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Bob,
Unfortunately all the USB 3.0 PCI Express cards that currently exist lack Mac drivers and there is no USB 3.0 support in Mac OS X. That’s why UltraStudio Pro, Intensity Shuttle and Pocket UltraScope are currently only supported on Windows. Hopefully USB 3.0 support will be added to Macs and which case it would be easy for Blackmagic Design to make these new products work on Mac OS X.
It might be possible to use Bootcamp and a USB 3.0 PCI Express card in a PCI Express 2.0 slot but it’s not something we’ve tested and I’m not sure whether you would get the full USB 3.0 speed required for uncompressed video capture and playback. In any case, running Bootcamp would not be very convenient if wanting to use Final Cut Pro.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Chris,
Further to the information from Peter and Dwaine, you might like to read the first part of Grant Petty’s email from NAB 2010. Amongst other things, it states, “anyone who has an older DaVinci 2K system can use the control surface they have, and upgrade to DaVinci Resolve just by paying the Linux license only.” So you’re perfectly correct in saying that would be $19,995.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi George,
Yes, the DeckLink 7.6, Multibridge 7.6 and Intensity 3.6 drivers for Mac and Windows all support CS5. It’s beta support to work with the beta version of CS5 and we’ll release updated drivers with the release of CS5.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Patrick,
I don’t have a DaVinci background so I’m going to try getting the DaVinci guys to answer your questions. They’re flat out at NAB but I hope to get you some answers very soon.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Arnie,
More slots and InfiniBand support would allow multiple computers to be clustered together just like the Linux PCs. That would be nice!
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Arnie,
We will look at any options to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the computer but I don’t think a PCI expansion chassis will help due to the shared bandwidth on a single slot. GPU cards demand all the speed that a dedicated slot can provide. 3D will continue to require a Linux system for the foreseeable future but our engineers would love to make it possible on a Mac Pro if they can.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Hi Arnie,
That’s a very good question and I wasn’t sure myself if one Mac Pro could do 3D so I referred your question to Grant Petty.
Grant said that Resolve software for Mac has all the same powerful features, including 3D support, as the Linux version. However 3D requires two NVIDIA cards for the left eye and right eye and no testing has been done with two GPU cards on Mac OS X and you might run out of PCIe slots for disk storage as the GPU cards take up a lot of space. Stereoscopic 3D also halves the number of realtime effects you would get on the same hardware so we’re just not sure how well 3D would perform on a single Mac Pro.
So this is something that we will look at after we’ve shipped the initial Mac version but we can’t look at it now so we’re not advertizing or promising 3D support. As Macs and graphics cards become faster, it might be possible to do 3D with enough realtime performance and effects to be useful. That would be nice and I’m sure our engineers will want to check that out in the future.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design